My friend built a new computer, so she gave me her old one. Which is better than my current one. What would you do? I'm guessing you'd pull open the cases and see if you can just jam your old hard drive in the new one and get going. Or that's what I'd do. But alas, where is the very short and thin connector (SATA) like goes to this hard drive? I cannot seem to find it.

Well okay, no problem, I can just plug this other hard drive in that has the usual wide thick connector (they claim to be Ultra ATA, but I see nothing particularly ultra about them), tell it to pretend to be my current hard drive, and put it in the other one. Okay that one didn't work, let's try the other one. No luck. Two dead hard drives. It's a good thing I wasn't using them. But maybe... yes, it appears that the motherboard does in fact support my hard drive. Even better, it has a bajillion (give or take six) sockets. So I can just plug it in after all. Sweet! But I guess it needs power. Hm. Power supply only has those stubby, hard to insert/remove four-pin thingies.

I guess a new power supply is called for.

But wait... I have a perfectly good one right now! It's just... 150 watts lower. I wonder if that's enough. But maybe I'm not being creative enough. Not at all. I should pull out the old power supply, stick it in the new computer, not really attached, just floating there in the space where a normal person would have a DVD drive, and plug that in to the SATA. I'm sure that can cause all manner of horrible problems.

In the meantime I pillaged the video card, so now my Windows XP is much uh... XPer.

4
comments:

Masterlooter
said...

If/when you do fully switch over to the new system, I'd recommend a full reload of Windows. It can get pretty upset when you switch CPU archetectures and chipsets (motherboards).

Assuming I'm reading you correctly, this should solve your power issue for quite a few bucks cheaper than a whole new power supply.

So if I'm reading this correctly, there were no hard drives and the power supply had all of its cables cut except a 4 pin connector? How does a power supply not have the full 20(+4) pin motherboard supply? That's an essential component.

Also, if this computer was supposed to be better, how does putting your old and (I'm assuming) cruddy video card make windows run better?

Umm, I don't want to tell anyone to do anything illegal but Windows 7 ultra super-duper package is still sitting cached on most torrent sites. Not That I would ever go to a torrent site myself. In fact don't, it's completely morally wrong.

The power supply has the mobi connector. It's a fully functioning computer beside the lack of a hard drive. I took the better card and put it in m old computer, not the other way around.

I wouldn't pirate windows 7 since I think it would be worth the money to buy it, and I object to denying money for worthwhile products. I doubt I'll upgrade any time soon since it's cheaper to keep my current OS.